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Zettlr is free and open source Markdown application designed for academic writing. It provides a lot of powerful tools to help you write academic texts right out of the box.
The application’s stated goal is simple: “Enabling researchers of arts and humanities, e.g. those people without any knowledge of coding, to finally free themselves from software that costs hundreds of dollars and pave the way into an Open Source era. This would be only fitting, given the fact that especially in political science and sociology, cries for Open Access journals are on the rise. So here’s what Zettlr is all about: It wants to be serious competition for word processors.”
See the Zettlr Documentation for the official documentation. Zettlr uses Pandoc Markdown as its dialect. Beyond syntax highlighting for CommonMark, GFM, and Pandoc extensions, Zettlr adds first-class support for Zettelkasten links and tags, citations with reference manager integration, footnotes, LaTeX math, and Mermaid diagrams. Excelling at academic workflows: project-based export to PDF, Word, HTML and others via Pandoc; custom templates for journals and conferences; a graph view for visualizing note connections. Additional features include multi-cursor editing, Emacs and Vim modes, snippets, spell and grammar checking (including LanguageTool), as well as a built-in Pomodoro timer.
Zettlr provides support for the following Markdown elements.
| Element | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Headings | Yes | |
| Paragraphs | Yes | |
| Line Breaks | Yes | In addition to trailing whitespace, you can also use a trailing backslash or press the Return key once to achieve the same result. |
| Bold | Yes | |
| Italic | Yes | |
| Blockquotes | Yes | |
| Ordered Lists | Yes | |
| Unordered Lists | Yes | |
| Code | Yes | |
| Horizontal Rules | Yes | |
| Links | Yes | |
| Images | Yes | |
| Tables | Yes | |
| Fenced Code Blocks | Yes | |
| Syntax Highlighting | Yes | |
| Footnotes | Yes | |
| Heading IDs | Yes | |
| Definition Lists | Partial | No editor highlighting. Handled by pandoc on export. |
| Strikethrough | Yes | |
| Task Lists | Yes | |
| Emoji (copy and paste) | Yes | |
| Emoji (shortcodes) | Yes | |
| Highlight | Yes | ==text== or ::text:: syntax. Also [text]{.mark} via Pandoc span. |
| Subscript | Yes | |
| Superscript | Yes | |
| Automatic URL Linking | Yes | |
| Disabling Automatic URL Linking | No | |
| HTML | Yes | HTML blocks and inline HTML supported. Handled by Pandoc on export. |
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